Really Cool iPad Magic

By Sebastien Page on May 31, 2010

Check out this video of a Japanese dude doing some cool magic tricks with his iPad. The trick is not too hard. He’s playing a video and his show it timed to the second on this video. It still is a nice and entertaining show.


 

Quickly Change Wifi Network With YFiSelect

By Guest Author on May 31, 2010

Do you hate the fact that you have to exit out of your app and go into the settings just to change your wifi network? Well now there’s an app for that!

From the developer that brought you jailbreak apps such as Music Controls, Calendar Pro and Resupported comes his latest app called YFiSelect. YFiSelect gives you quick access to your wifi network options from anywhere.

In order to get YFiSelect to work you just simply hold your carrier down until you get prompted to change your wifi network or you hold down the wifi button in SBSettings. It is also compatible with Activator and WiCarrier.

YFiSelect is available on Cydia for $0.99. It is compatible with the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

 

Netflix App Hacked to Work on iPhone

By Sebastien Page on May 30, 2010

Until now you could only play the Netflix application on the iPad but a smart MMI reader figured out a way to port the app to the iPhone.

Here are the instructions on how to set up Netflix on the iPhone:

  • Get the Netflix app from iTunes
  • Locate and rename the .ipa file to .zip and extract it
  • Go into the .app file, located at /appname/Payload/appname.app, (show package contents) and open the info.plist
  • Edit all references of OS version to show iphone OS 3.1.3 (or your respective version). Save and close

Now, just copied over SSH (with permissions repair and a respring) this will show up on the phone. With Netflix though, it required the mediaplayer frameworks from the iPad.

  • SSH, get the mediaplayer frameworks folder from an iPad, located at /System/Library/Frameworks/MediaPlayer.framework
  • Copy that to the same location on an iPhone (don’t forget to back up the original from your iPhone just in case). Change permissions to 755 recursive for directories, and then go inside the folder and change the individual file permissions to 644. (Or just recursive 755 to all files/folders on the MediaPlayer.framework folder)

Now the mediaplayer frameworks are in place, all that’s left is a manual install of the app.

  • SSH, go to /private/var/stash/Applications
  • Copy the appname.app file there and change permissions. (I used 777 recursive for simplicity’s sake, but I’m sure the normal 775 would work).
  • Launch and have fun.

These instructions were copied from MMI and slightly altered for reading purposes.

This great hack has some downsides. Apparently Netflix on the iPhone will drain your battery, crash repetitively and will be very slow on 3G, which is not very surprising. Maybe these reasons are why Netflix hasn’t released an official iPhone app yet.

I’m currently in France and I can’t get Netflix to work here but I’d love to hear your feedback if you try it on. [via MMI]

 

SmokeScreen to Play Flash Videos on Your iPhone and iPad

By Sebastien Page on May 30, 2010

Flash. That’s something most iPhone users have been forced to give up. Fortunately there is still a handful of renegade coders that won’t let Steve Jobs and his gang dictate what you can or cannot view on your iPhone.

Chris Smoak is one of these guys. Because he is aware that no matter what Apple thinks, Flash is still a huge part of the Internet, he developed Smokescreen, a workaround that will allow you to play Flash content on your iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

Here is how SmokeScreen works: “It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio and turns them in to base64 encoded data:uris, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG.”

SmokeScreen is just at its beginnings. Since Smokescreen is written in JavaScript, it is slower than the Flash plugin and is limited in speed by the performance of the browser. Still, it’s a nice beginning that gives us hope to see Flash one day running on iPhone OS. [via Engadget]

 

ProSwitcher HD for iPad to be Released Soon

By Sebastien Page on May 30, 2010

ProSwitcher, one of the best jailbreak apps that brought multitasking to the iPhone is about to be updated for the iPad. Ryan Petrich, the developer of ProSwitcher sent a tweet a few hours ago announcing the future release of the application.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with ProSwitcher yet, it is a multitasking app for the iPhone that kinda replicates the Palm Pre “cards” feature by adding a very nice UI to Backrounder, the jailbreak app that allows you to run apps in the background.

I’m a big fan of Ryan Petrich’s work in general, and specially of ProSwitcher which I consider a must-have application. I’m definitely looking forward the iPad release. So far, there is no estimated time of arrival but I doubt it will take too long.

 

iPhone News You Missed This Week

By Sebastien Page on May 30, 2010

This is a wrapup of all the articles that were published on the blog this past week.

 

Wi-Fi Sync Updated for Windows and iPad

By Sebastien Page on May 29, 2010

A couple of weeks ago, I told you about Wi-Fi Sync, a jailbreak app that allows you to sync your iPhone over wifi. At the time, Wi-Fi sync was only available on Mac OS X.

An update is now available for Wi-Fi Sync that brings support for Windows users, and also for the iPad.

You can get Wi-Fi Sync from Cydia for $9.99. You will also need to install the free software on your computer.

 

This is Big: Bing to Replace Google in iPhone OS 4

By Sebastien Page on May 29, 2010

This is some seriously big news. TechCrunch reported yesterday that according to their sources, Bing might replace Google as the default search engine in the upcoming iPhone OS 4.

To most people, this news won’t mean much and some of you might even think it’s not a big deal. But it is. It is a huge deal because it’s just one more fight between Apple and Google in the great battle to take over the mobile market.

Back in December I wrote an article (one of the first on the topic, mind you) titled “Apple Vs Google: the war is on” in which I was kinda predicting that things were going to turn bad between the 2 giants. Then a bit later, rumors started going around that Apple and Microsoft might actually join forces to fight the oh-so-evil Google.

Today it seems that these rumors are resurfacing, and as anti-Google advocate, I’m hoping these rumors come true.

Google is rumored to be paying $100M/year to Apple for being the default search engine. My guess is that Microsoft offered at least the same amount. At any rates, I don’t think Apple is in it for the money here ; after all, $100M is peanuts for Apple.

They’re just realizing that the iPhone is powered by too many Google services (maps, YouTube, search), and if they want to fight Google on the mobile market, they have to fight them everywhere, which means getting rid of as many Google services.

While a Microsoft/Apple partnership would have sounded completely crazy a few years ago, it seems to make more and more sense today. Microsoft is not going to win the mobile battle (heck, they’re already losing it) and they know it. They also know they have to partner with someone strong in the mobile market if they want to be relevant in search. Good move from Microsoft if indeed this rumor is true.

In the meanwhile, Apple surpasses Microsoft as the largest tech company in the world. It’s crazy to see how quickly things can move.

What do you think?

 

05.12.01 Baseband Unlock for iPhone Coming Soon

By Sebastien Page on May 29, 2010

Some good news for those of you who accidentally upgraded their iPhone to OS 3.1.3 with baseband 05.12.01. According to MuscleNerd, there will be an iPhone unlock for baseband 05.12.01 when iPhone OS 4 comes out later this June.

MuscleNerd revealed this information when someone asked him about it on Twitter.

In his reply, MuscleNerd confirmed there will be an unlock for the iPhone 3GS but he also gave us a piece of advice that is too often disregarded.

It is indeed not widely understood enough that one should not update his iPhone right away when Apple pushes a new OS update. If you want to be able to jailbreak or unlock future iPhone OSs, then keep in mind not to update right away. Wait for a while until the Dev Team gives us a go or instructions to update safely while preserving the baseband.

 

Publish Your Book in Apple’s iBookStore

By Sebastien Page on May 28, 2010

Apple has implemented a way for accomplished writers as well as wannabes to distribute their content on the iBookStore. I’m sure JD Salinger would despise this but it’s still a good way for anyone to get in front of a massive audience.

This service allows you to submit your books but also to set up your account to collect your remuneration from books sales.

I guess the hardest part here is not to get your book in the iBookStore, it’s to get it written…

You can check all the requirements here.

 

10 Year Old Kid Fixes Cracked iPhone Screen in 40 Minutes for $22

By Sebastien Page on May 28, 2010

If you ever cracked the screen of your iPhone, you faced 2 options. You could either pay $200 to have it fixed, or you could fix it yourself. Not sure you can do it yourself? Then check out this 10 year old kid who fixed his dad’s cracked iPhone screen in under 40 minutes, all this at the ridiculous amount of $21.95.

To make you feel better, the kid comes from a geeky family. Still, it’s a nice performance!

More pictures on Cnet.

 

Using A PIN Barely Protects Your iPhone Data

By Sebastien Page on May 28, 2010

So you thought that using a PIN was enough to protect your iPhone data? Think again! According to a recent report by Bernd Marienfeldt, your iPhone is highly vulnerable and leaves your data wide open, even if protected by a PIN.

Sure a PIN can protect you from having the average thief dig into your data but someone with more technical knowledge and a computer running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx can easily navigate into the guts of your iPhone, even if it is locked and not jailbroken.

According to Engadget: “The belief is that they’re just a buffer overflow away from full write access as well, which would surely open the door to making calls. Bernd believes the iPhone’s lack of data encryption for content is a real problem, and also cites the inability to digitally sign e-mails as reasons why the iPhone is still not ready for prime time in the enterprise.”

What can you do right now to protect your data? Nothing. Just cross your fingers hoping that Apple will soon enforce data encryption for its devices.

You can read the full report here.

 

iBye – An Easy Alternative to Back Up Your iPhone Data

By Guest Author on May 28, 2010

Recently released by a developer named EvilPenguin under the ModMyI repo is a pretty cool and useful app called iBye.

iBye can replace iTunes as far as backing your data. If you’re on the road and don’t have iTunes nearby or if you’re one of many anti-iTunes individuals out there, then iBye is perfect for you. iBye will backup your data and store that data on a FTP server of your choice . iBye will restore this data from the backup on that FTP server as well.

In order to do this, you just need to get yourself an FTP server if you don’t already have one. Windows users can get one here. Mac users here.

If you do not want to use a FTP server, then iBye will do a local backup and local restore on the iDevice itself.

iBye supports your basic applications such as Mail, Notes, Safari, Calendar, Photos and Contacts along with your system log.

It’s a great application to backup your important information on the fly (ie. your contacts).

iBye also gives you the option to remove your data from the application of your choice if that’s what you want to do. This is helpful if you want to clear your calendar but don’t feel like going through each and every entry.

For a little bit under what you usually pay for a gallon of gas in California, you can get iBye $2.99.

 

iPhone 3GS OS 4 Beta 4 Jailbroken

By Sebastien Page on May 27, 2010

Yesterday I was telling you about RedSn0w 0.9.5b4, a tool to jailbreak the iPhone 3G running iPhone OS 4 beta 4. Today, Dutch developer Kaatje managed to jailbreak an iPhone 3GS with OS 4 beta 4.

She notes on her blog:

Cydia still has some issues, many applications install but crash, some examples include mobileterminal, sbsettings, five icon dock. I did this only to hopefully motivate the developers to get their applications ready for 4.0 as it is coming very soon and the last thing we need in the community is to have repos full of broken apps! I accomplished this by patching asr, lockdownd, LLB, iBEC, IBSS, iBoot, kernelcache, MobileSafari, Services.plist, and fstab. The binaries were patched with IDA Pro and OxED and were then diffed against the original pwned files with bsdiff to create patch files. I then took the diff files and built a firmware bundle that I dropped into Pwnagetool and updated the cydia tree within Pwnagetool as well. Once this was done, I created a custom ipsw with Pwnagetool, unzipped it, applied a pwned LLB from a pwnagetool generated 3.1.3 ipsw, zipped it back up and restored to my device. At this time I am unable to get my T-Mobile NL sim to work so I downgraded back to 3.1.3 after playing around with 4.0 for a while. I look forward to the release and the official unlock from the Dev-Team.

That’s interesting to see she was able to downgrade back to 3.1.3. Other interesting point is the mention of the “official unlock from the Dev-Team”. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I’d think that the Dev Team already found an exploit to unlock iPhone OS 4 but they’re waiting for the official release to make it available to the general public.

What do you think?

 

SNES (HD): Super Nintendo Emulator for Jailbroken iPad

By Sebastien Page on May 27, 2010

Most of us with jailbroken iPhones are already familiar with the PlayStation, Game Boy, Nes and Super Nes emulators, those hacks that bring our favorite old games to the iPhone or iPod Touch.

Because bigger is better, now comes SNES (HD), a Super Nintendo emulator for iPad and controlled with an iPhone. Don’t need to read this previous sentence again because I’m going to repeat it for you: SNES (HD) is a Super Nintendo emulator for iPad that allows you to play any Super Nes game and control them with your iPhone.

SNES (HD) is an iPad port of the popular Super Nintendo emulator Snes9x. It is based on ZodTTD’s iPhone port snes4iphone but it has been rewritten for the  iPad.

How to install the SNES (HD) Super Nes emulator on your iPad

Step 1: Your iPad and iPhone must be jailbroken. If it’s not, jailbreak them. At the time this article is written, Spirit is the best way to jailbreak your iPad and iPhone.

Step 2: In Cydia, add the following source to your iPad and iPhone: http://wherethewoozlewasnt.com/cydia. SNES (HD) should be released in the ModMyI repo soon but for the moment, you will need to add this source manually.

Step 3: Once the source has been added, install SNES (HD) on your iPad and ControlPad on your iPhone.

Step 4: Now you need to add Super Nintendo ROMs to your iPad in /var/mobile/Media/ROMs/SNES. The best way to add ROMs is by using WinSCP for Windows or CyberDuck for Mac. If you don’t have any Super Nintendo ROMs in there, you obviously won’t be able to do anything. For legal reasons I cannot tell you where to find ROMs but a quick Google search with right keywords should get you what you’re looking for.

Step 5: Make sure bluetooth is enabled on both your iPhone and iPad. Launch SNES (HD) on your iPad and ControlPad on your iPhone.

Step 6: Your iPad and iPhone will start looking for each other. After about a minute, “Tap to Connect” will pop up on your iPhone. Tap on the entry for your iPad, and in a second the iPad will display an “Accept/Deny” screen.  Hit “accept” and you’ll be connected.

Step 7: Select a ROM from the list of ROMs available (it depends on how many you added) and enjoy your Super Nes emulator for iPad.

100% credit for this goes to the developer of SNES (HD) and his blog Where the woozle wasn’t. I simply made the instructions clearer and easier.

This Super Nintendo emulator for iPad is free but the developer accepts donations. If you’re going to use SNES (HD) that’d be nice if you could send him a few bucks by visiting his site and hitting the “donate” button.

If you’re still on the fence about installing SNES (HD) on your iPad, watch this video.

 

Apple Surpasses Microsoft’s Market Capitalization and Becomes World’s Biggest Tech Company

By Sebastien Page on May 26, 2010

Apple finally surpassed Microsoft in terms of market capitalization to become the world’s largest tech company. Obviously, there are many criteria on which you can rate companies and my guess is that Microsoft still surpasses Apple on many of them (ie. market shares for the personal computer market).

Anyway you look at it, it’s still huge news. At the time I’m writing this, Microsoft market cap is at 225.58 billion dollars which Apple’s is at 226.57 billions.

I’m glad I got some of those Apple stocks a while back…

 

Dev Team Releases Redsn0w 0.9.5b4 Jailbreak for iPhone OS 4 Beta 4

By Sebastien Page on May 26, 2010

RedSn0w has been updated to version 0.9.5b4 by the Dev Team for the recent iPhone OS 4 beta 4. This beta release of RedSn0w is not for casual iPhone users. It is aimed at developers of jailbreak apps so they can update their applications to work on OS 4.

RedSn0w 0.9.5b4 jailbreak for iPhone OS 4 beta 4 uses the same pwnage2 DFU-mode exploit that has been using since OS 2.X, so nothing has been revealed to Apple.

Because this version is for iPhone OS 4 beta 1-4 which contain a baseband update, anyone who’s remotely interested in unlocking should stay away from the OS 4 betas or even this version of RedSn0w.

Further information and instructions can be found here.

 

myPhoneDesktop: Send Images, Text, URLs and More Wirelessly to Your iPhone

By Sebastien Page on May 26, 2010

myPhoneDesktop is an application from the App Store that lets you send phone numbers, URLs, text, and images from any desktop computer to your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch over the air.

With myPhoneDesktop, you can send content quickly from your desktop to your iPhone. Whether you want to send a long Google Map URL to a friend, or some text to a business colleague, or a photo to iPhone, myPhoneDesktop makes it easy.

myPhoneDesktop makes your iPhone an extension of your desktop by making them work seamlessly together. If you can copy it, you can send it to the iPhone. Using the comfort of your Mac or PC full keyboard, you can send SMS messages, notes, or anything you can type. And in moments, it will be on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

On one end, you’ve got your desktop application. From there, you can copy any phone number, text, image or URL and hit “copy” to send it to your iDevice.

On the other end, you’ve got your iDevice. Simply launch myPhoneDesktop and the content you sent from your desktop computer will magically appear, assuming you are connected to the internet whether on wifi or 3G. From there, you can open, copy, etc…

myPhoneDesktop can also notify you with push notifications, letting you view the file right away or ignore it to see it later.

That’s a very simple yet very useful application. I usually send myself emails with text, images or phone numbers really often and it can be a little cumbersome. Now I can send a phone number effortlessly and assign it to a contact or call it directly from my iPhone.

The desktop app is compatible with Mac, Windows and Linux. They also have a web client that allows you to bypass the whole download thing and lets you send content from any computer equipped with a web browser.

You can download myPhoneDesktop from the App Store for $1.99. It will work for your iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch

You can check the ugly myPhoneDesktop website here. [via Gizmodo]

 

aDownloader Download Manager for iPhone

By Sebastien Page on May 25, 2010

aDownloader is a download manager that lets you download many different files to your iPhone or iPod Touch. With over 40 supported files, aDownloader will download all your files over any available network, from any site, including hosting sites such as RapidShare and MegaUpload.

The supported files include but are not limited to:

  • PDF
  • Word (doc and docx)
  • Excel (xls, xlsx)
  • PowerPoint (ppt, pptx)
  • Audio files (mp3, m4a, wav)
  • Videos (mpeg, 3gp, mov, youtube)
  • Image files (jpg, png, gif, bmp)
  • Text files (txt, html, xml)
  • RAR and Zip archives (including multipart, password protected)

With aDownloader, you can easily manage and organize your downloads by creating folders, copying, deleting and moving files around.

This app gives you access to multiple simultaneous downloads, with no file limit. You can pause/resume interrupted downloads. If your internet connection fails, you can even resume your download later.

Finally, the best feature seems to be that you can download/upload your files to/from your desktop computer via your web browser.

I haven’t tried aDownloader myself but it sure looks like a winner for those of you who need to regularly download files to your iPhone.

aDownloader is a free application you can download right now from Cydia. If you try aDownloader, please share your feedback with us in the comments section.

 

Browser Changer: Open Links in Third-Party Browsers

By Sebastien Page on May 25, 2010

Browser Changer is a new applications available in Cydia that lets you make a third-party browser your default browser. This way, you can open links in a third-party browser instead of opening them in Safari.

Why would use this application? Let me explain. Let’s say your web browser of choice is Opera Mini. Every time you click on a link in an email for example, you may want this link to open in Opera Mini. Apple doesn’t let you do this but Browser Changer will.

This is definitely not a ground breaking application, but it is still a nice tweak for those of you who use a browser different from Safari. This app also comes with a SBSettings toggle, so you can turn it on/off easily and quickly.

Browser Changer offers support for Atomic, iCab Mobile, Perfect Browser and Opera Mini. You can simply choose your default browser in the settings.app.

You can get Browser Changer for free from Cydia. If you decide to try it on, please leave a comment below to tell us what you think about this app.

Thanks @PhoneTrips for the tip!

 
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